To think this is bloody daft of the hotel?

[JurassicPark101]

I’ve booked a hotel for Friday night until Monday morning. Unfortunately due to childcare issues I found out today that I won’t be able to get there until Saturday morning now. It’s all been prepaid for and as it’s less than 7 days before the booking it’s completely non-refundable and can’t be rearranged.

I’m not too fussed about it being non-refundable, totally understand they probably wouldn’t be able to fill the room again at short notice. Anyway, I phone the hotel to let them know that I do still want the booking but that I won’t be arriving until about 9.30ish on the Saturday rather than the Friday afternoon as originally planned. Receptionist on phone says ‘that’s fine, thanks for letting us know. Just so you know you’re welcome to use the facilities but your room won’t be available until check in at 3pm.” I reiterate that I’ve already paid for the room (and breakfast and dinner which I won’t be having either) from Friday so it should be available when I get there at 9.30. Again “sorry, no but we can’t allow early check in under any circumstances at the moment. We’re totally fully booked and the cleaners just can’t get the rooms ready before this.”

I ask to speak to someone else as I assume she’s possibly new or young or thick as mince. She passes me over to another woman but I hear her say “can you speak to this lady, she won’t understand why she can’t check in at 9.30am”. I explain the situation again. New lady replies with “I empathise with your situation but as we are fully booked we simply can’t allow you to check in nearly 6 hours early”. I tell her that it’s not 6 hours early, it’s 18 hours late. Im booked from the Friday night. I’m paying for the Friday night but I can’t get there until Saturday morning. I’ve paid £145 for a room, dinner and breakfast and none of it will be used. If I was arriving on time, I would be able to return to my room at 9.30am if I chose to do so. She tell me that I'm not arriving on time though so the room won’t be ready until 3pm .

I ask if there’s a manager that I can email, or a head office as this is just bonkers. She gives me an email address. I write a very calm, concise email explaining that I’ll be getting there at 9.30 the day after I’m due to arrive. I’ve just had an email back (from the reception again) telling me that my room will be ready at 3pm and they hope I enjoy my stay.

How do I resolve this? They’re all mad. Aren’t they? I’m not going crazy in thinking I should be allowed in the room when I get there am I? It should be ready for 3pm on Friday so will still be ready at 9.30 on Saturday, surely?

This would infuriate me.

Hotel is bonkers!!!! Would also drive me crazy…if they can’t let you stay on Friday night, then they should refund you for that night!

@SusieBob - to be fair many people who work in hotels have said this would be fine at their hotel - they just pre check in and put a note on the booking that the customer is arriving late.

Good luck, OP

It’s ridiculous. I wonder if reframing the question might help. ‘I have booked the room from Friday. Are you telling me I am not allowed to be in it at 9.30am on Friday morning?’ It makes them clarify what they’re really saying.

@JurassicPark101 They won’t assign you a room until you arrive on Saturday, so normal check-in time for Saturday - unless you’re able to check in on Friday remotely and get your room assigned to you - so online as someone suggested?
Otherwise, they will simply accept other customers and fill all rooms Friday night, regardless whether you’ve already paid, so yes they will need to prep a room for you when you arrive Saturday. Probably in the Ts&Cs.
I think it’s also a matter of musical chairs in that a room that may have been assigned to you if you arrived Friday will get assigned to someone else when you fail to check in, and the room you actually get will be one vacated Saturday morning. It’s tight logistics - particularly with the huge demand currently.

No shows are built in to the pricing structure, hence why it's cheaper, it's based on some people not turning up and them selling the room again. It's not cheeky, it's how they operate.

However I do agree that, if you do turn up, they should let you have a room straight away and they should accommodate the OPs request.

And if the room isn't available because it's been used as a contingency for another guest, they should still do whatever they'd do when a paying customer needs a room and they've been caught out.

There's lots of research and complicated algorithms behind overbooking as in how far they can push it but minimising getting caught out by not having a room available. Especially in the days of their customers being able to tell the world via the medium of TripAdvisor and the like.

Although I'd have thought that, in Cornwall in August, they wouldn't risk it too far, especially as holiday no shows will be far lower than business ones and it's unlikely that there will be a spare room nearby.

Totally different situation compared with a midweek business booking in a city centre, where there's likely to be another room available in walking distance.

I wonder what would happen if you rang them on Friday evening, told them you have 'been stuck in traffic and have broken down' but are now on your way and will arrive and need the room in the morning and want to check in now as you will need the room then to catch up on sleep due to driving through the night?

Like a PP says, I think the problem here is that you've tried to be too helpful by informing them in advance.

This is bonkers!! It sounds like the sort of thing that would be in a rhod Gilbert stand-up show!

I hope the buggers haven't sold your room on again in the interim!
And I hope that your friend has a lovely dinner - I also cannot imagine why on earth she'd sooner stay in a tent than the hotel room, but some people are funny that way - and that everything is fine for you when you turn up on Saturday morning.

If someone is going to check in for you make sure that you have read the T&C's. I have been to some hotels that ask to see the card the booking was made on and/or proof of ID.

Why is it that you'd assume someone was young because they 'didn't understand you' boils my blood.

That's crazy! Your plan sounds good 😃 I'm really scared that it's going to baffle them further too high

@JurassicPark101

kidneybeans I tried explaining several times. It was almost like they were reading off a prompt sheet rather than listening to what I was actually saying though. I’d explain why I should be able to access the room, again and get “I empathise with your situation Mrs JurassicPark but unfortunately as we are fully booked and the cleaners can’t get the room ready earlier I am unable to fulfil your request”.

I feel like this conversation is a bit like talking to the hotel

Stop explaining and instead keep asking questions.
Why do the cleaners need access to the room?

It doesn't sound like they ever answered that question (or that you have specifically asked it)

@trappedsincesundaymorn

If someone is going to check in for you make sure that you have read the T&C's. I have been to some hotels that ask to see the card the booking was made on and/or proof of ID.

The T&Cs will include some unhelpful 'may be asked for ID/may ask to see card the room was booked in' wording.

I've stayed in hotels a lot that have been booked by our work's corporate travel provider, so obviously I don't have access to the payment card and I could be any body, and sometimes we do send different people to the person booked anyway, if we've swapped jobs, or someone was ill or whatever. They've never asked for ID, as far as I recall.

I've also arrived at a hotel for the first time at 8 am before after a night shift and was granted immediate access to the room I would have probably fallen asleep on the reception floor if they hadn't but again the room was booked the day before by my employer so I don't know what arrangements were made about late check in, but there were airline crew using the hotel so they would have been used to arrivals at all times of day and night.

I think hotels are required to ask for ID if someone walks in and pays cash, but other than that, it's probably very rare.

The fact is, if you don't check into a room on a friday in a great
number of hotels you will not be able to book in until the normal checkin day on the saturday. It may sound daft but that is how it works
Enough posters on this thread and I have done exactly the same as op and got into our room at some point in our booked stay, whether 3am, 6am or 9.30am. It's never been a problem for me. I have paid for my room and if I wish to simply never step foot in it for my booked time then I can do just that.
Hotels must know that flights are delayed, cars break down, couples break up (happened to me once and we argued over who would use the hotel booking for quite some time) life happens. And paying customers will be late for a multitude of reasons, but once the room is paid for its that customers right to come and go as and when.

Urgh, such "computer says no" thinking. Good luck OP. I do the same as you and fuck off for a few days at a time every now and then.

@JurassicPark101

kidneybeans I tried explaining several times. It was almost like they were reading off a prompt sheet rather than listening to what I was actually saying though. I’d explain why I should be able to access the room, again and get “I empathise with your situation Mrs JurassicPark but unfortunately as we are fully booked and the cleaners can’t get the room ready earlier I am unable to fulfil your request”.

Did you ask why the cleaners weren't getting the room ready on Friday?

Well I hope you get that room OP. It's crazy that that you can't be accommodated without all this rigmarole, just because your plans have altered slightly. It's not like you want anything you haven't paid for.

It does sound like a Rhod Gilbert sketch !

They are absolutely insane. I would go completely nuclear on them!

@Totallydefeated

You say "duh?" but plenty of people on this thread clearly don't get how things work and clearly don't bother - like most people, to be fair - to read the conditions that they book hotel rooms under.

Well, yes, because what sane, reasonable person would think a hotel that valued its reputation and customer experiences would draft its T&Cs to give it maximum opportunity to rip off its customers and despoil its own reputation?

It may be legal because they’ve got people booking to sign up to unreasonable T&Cs, but it’s not right. You can’t expect the layman to know or even suspect a hotel would gleefully trouser a charge for a nights stay and then refuse their paying customer use of a portion of it (that they paid for!!). What kind of arsehole does this kind of thing?

A business does it. A company trying to make money, with responsibilities to pay it's staff, it's overheads and make profit. Why wouldn't it?

If a hotel knows that a room is sitting empty, especially in busy cities or in popular holiday spots where they are running at high occupancy of course they are going to try to resell it. It happens all the time and most of the time the people staying in the hotels are completely none the wiser.

@SusieBob

So how can someone get access to a hotel room in the morning then? Presumably hotels know that people aren't always able to check in between 3pm and midnight, so how does a traveller get a hotel room they can check in to in the morning?

A business does it. A company trying to make money, with responsibilities to pay it's staff, it's overheads and make profit. Why wouldn't it?

If a hotel knows that a room is sitting empty, especially in busy cities or in popular holiday spots where they are running at high occupancy of course they are going to try to resell it. It happens all the time and most of the time the people staying in the hotels are completely none the wiser.

That’s ok if the guest doesn’t want the room in during the time they’ve already paid for. If they do, then it’s not ok and it’s not ok for the hotel to bar the guest from the room in order to try to make more money.

I run holiday lets and sometimes people arrive late or the day after they’ve booked for. That’s fine. I don’t sell their dates from under them.
You can’t be sure their plans won’t change and they turn up early.

A business does it. A company trying to make money, with responsibilities to pay it's staff, it's overheads and make profit. Why wouldn't it?

You keep repeating this but ignoring the posts that point out the need for businesses like hotels to be mindful of customer satisfaction and reputation.

Of course hotels are businesses and are in it for the money, nobody disputes this. But a good business owner will not just be drooling over the idea of squeezing out every last penny they can from a customer in the short term, they also need to look to the medium and long term and sometimes sacrificing fleecing someone in the here and now makes way better business sense, as it promotes customer loyalty, a good reputation etc, which is worth far more in the long term if you want a sustainable briskness with long term growth. I know this as a business owner myself. You can’t be tunnel-visioned about relentlessly pursuing profit and not giving a shit about customer satisfaction and justify it to yourself as ‘being a business’ if you want to build a reputable and profitable brand.

What has happened here is that OP has paid for a service and they are denying her the benefit of part of that service because of an arbitrary rule that suits only the hotel, not the customer. They have essentially taken money for a service and then refused to provide it. Without their exploitative T&Cs that could potentially fall within the definition of fraud in other circumstances. OP and anyone in a similar situation will certainly feel ripped off. And well they might, it’s greedy, exploitative and unfair, regardless of whether it’s common practice or the hotel is a business and therefore is set up with the purpose of making money.

If the hotel cared about getting 5 star instead of 1 star reviews, if it cared about the experience and satisfaction of its customers, it wouldn’t deprive the OP of the service it’s taken her money for on some silly gotcha.

Perhaps if the hotel is in a popular area of Cornwall they think they can afford not to care about that as there will be business regardless. But it doesn’t make it right. I’d be leaving them a stinking review, personally.

That’s ok if the guest doesn’t want the room in during the time they’ve already paid for. If they do, then it’s not ok and it’s not ok for the hotel to bar the guest from the room in order to try to make more money.

Exactly, she wants to use the room during the time period she paid for it. So what’s the problem?

@Totallydefeated

A business does it. A company trying to make money, with responsibilities to pay it's staff, it's overheads and make profit. Why wouldn't it?

You keep repeating this but ignoring the posts that point out the need for businesses like hotels to be mindful of customer satisfaction and reputation.

Of course hotels are businesses and are in it for the money, nobody disputes this. But a good business owner will not just be drooling over the idea of squeezing out every last penny they can from a customer in the short term, they also need to look to the medium and long term and sometimes sacrificing fleecing someone in the here and now makes way better business sense, as it promotes customer loyalty, a good reputation etc, which is worth far more in the long term if you want a sustainable briskness with long term growth. I know this as a business owner myself. You can’t be tunnel-visioned about relentlessly pursuing profit and not giving a shit about customer satisfaction and justify it to yourself as ‘being a business’ if you want to build a reputable and profitable brand.

What has happened here is that OP has paid for a service and they are denying her the benefit of part of that service because of an arbitrary rule that suits only the hotel, not the customer. They have essentially taken money for a service and then refused to provide it. Without their exploitative T&Cs that could potentially fall within the definition of fraud in other circumstances. OP and anyone in a similar situation will certainly feel ripped off. And well they might, it’s greedy, exploitative and unfair, regardless of whether it’s common practice or the hotel is a business and therefore is set up with the purpose of making money.

If the hotel cared about getting 5 star instead of 1 star reviews, if it cared about the experience and satisfaction of its customers, it wouldn’t deprive the OP of the service it’s taken her money for on some silly gotcha.

Perhaps if the hotel is in a popular area of Cornwall they think they can afford not to care about that as there will be business regardless. But it doesn’t make it right. I’d be leaving them a stinking review, personally.

What service is being denied? Hotel rooms are sold by night. If someone phones up and says "I'm not going to be in my room tonight" then they are not being denied any service. If the person has the room booked for the following night then they will of course get access to the room, but if they impose a check-in time of 3pm no contracts are being broken. You weren't in the room overnight so why should you be able to access it at 10am? Some hotels don't even have the staff to handle check-ins at that time as they will be dealing with breakfast/checkouts etc.

If they have booked pre-pay, non-refundable room they are not going to get a refund either, that's the risk you take.

Of course not every hotel does it, and it differs between city-centre hotels with shorter bookings compared to holiday lets/resort hotels where bookings are longer and far more predictable, but a large number of hotels will seek to maximize revenue in this way and, as a business owner yourself, I'm sure you can understand that. 99% of the time the hotels do this with no problems whatsoever and that money is worth far more than a couple of arsey tripadvisor reviews. The hotels aren't stupid, they know the balance of reward vs risk is easily in favour of reselling..

[quote DysmalRadius]@SusieBob

So how can someone get access to a hotel room in the morning then? Presumably hotels know that people aren't always able to check in between 3pm and midnight, so how does a traveller get a hotel room they can check in to in the morning?[/quote]
Because, obviously, it varies between hotels, but if a person with a legitimate booking does get bumped what usually happens is they get put into a taxi and sent to the hotel round the corner with a drinks voucher. Hotels have reciprocal arrangements with others in the area to send bumped guests.